Discovery News reports that Japanese scientists have learned that about 15% of one species of snails eaten by birds survive the digestive process and emerge intact and alive on the other end.
Just one more reason never to leave the house: bird poop that can bust your head.
Some birds are smart…very, very smart…
Others, not so much:
Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea…
NEWS FLASH! Paleontologists in China have uncovered the remains of a huge raptor that helps sceintists bridge the evolutionary gap from dinosaurs to modern birds. Gigantoraptor erlianensis was 10-12 feet in height and weighed over 3000 pounds, and sported feathers and a beak.
NEWS FLASH! British researchers have discovered that plants have the ability to detect other plants of the same species in their area through “recognition” of chemical patterns in the surrounding soil. Furthermore, individual plants will respond to this information and change their absorption of nutrients in the soil to benefit the overall survival of their “siblings”.
NEWS FLASH! An independent consortium of research agencies studiyng the human genome has released a study which finds that so-called “junk DNA” is actually far more crucial to determining genetic traits than previously believed and may, in fact, be more important to the overall function of the genome than individual genes. These findings challenge much current thinking about human genetics, but at the same time also promise to yield a much better understanding of the biochemical process of life.
NEWS FLASH! A whopping 68 percent of registered Republican voters DO NOT BELIEVE any of the above. This recent Gallup/USA Today poll produced some truly disturbing results that show that in the overall population, 44% of Americans do not believe in evolution. When analyzed for religious affiliation, fundamentalist Protestants and so-called “moderate” Protestants reject modern science in favor of mythology and make-believe by a wide margin, with Catholics only slightly more likely to believe in science. Seculars and Jews were the most likely to believe in science and evolution.
Comments:
I am profoundly mortified by 44% of my fellow Americans. I was actually embarrassed for those Republican candidates when they stated publicly that they don’t believe in evolution. I mean, seriously, how do they face normal people after saying s**t like that with a straight face?
Posted by shelley [URL] on 06/15/07
Where are the normal people at?
These people are just stupid. It’s not even ignorance at this point. It’s just stupidity.
Pretty soon, they’ll be questioning whether electricity is real.
Posted by Sarah [URL] on 06/15/07
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Check out this Snopes article: a car wash owner in Maryland was losing money from his change machine and suspected his employees of stealing, so he set up a camera to catch them in the act. Imagine his surprise to discover that it was a gang of starlings!
The Snopes article clears up a few mis-reported elements of the story and has a few more pictures of the starlings in action.
Researchers at Harvard published an article in the journal Science yesterday that says they’ve found similarities in the proteins of Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils to those of modern-day chickens.
Sounds like they’re gonna need a re-write for the ending of Jurassic Park IV…and a really big fryolator.
Several online news sources had this story yesterday: like most animal noises, birdsong is now generally understood to be linguistic in nature — birds sing to denote territory, attract mates, spread alerts, and so on. But now it seems that some birds are multi-lingual. In particular, it seems that nuthatches understand chickadee vocalization and know when chickadees are warning each other about predators in the area.
The article goes on to say that it’s the number and frequency of the “dee-dee-dee” sound the little birds make when they utter their signature “chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee” call that indicates the threat level; the more “dee-dee-dee”, the higher the threat. Not unlike the Gestapo’s “Terror Alert” system, except that the chickadees know the difference between a real wolf and a fake one.
The cowbird is well-known for pushing the eggs out of other birds’ nests and laying its own eggs there, to be reared by unsuspecting parents. (Cowbirds are not alone in this behavior, cuckoos and other birds do this, as well as various insects. The phenomenon is called “brood parasitism”.)
This article from the Toronto Globe & Mail says that’s not the full extent of the behavior. If a host bird realizes that there has been a switch and tries to get rid of the cowbird egg, a group of cowbirds will come back and damage the nest in retaliation. This deliberate revenge has been dubbed “Mafia behavior” by the scientists who have just published a study of the birds’ behavior.
Their first clue was the pinkie rings and loud golf shirts favored by the Mafia cowbirds and the birds’ favorite call “Fuhgeddaboutit! Fuhgeddatboutit!”
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